[Translated from GegenStandpunkt 2-2009]
Since the inauguration of Mexico's President Calderón, news about “unsustainable” conditions in America's southern partner state becomes more frequent: “Mexico is stuck in the war on drugs,” “Helpless against crime” – that is how the headlines read. According to the relevant agencies, with their business operations, violence and corruption, murder and kidnappings, drug cartels increasingly define daily life. While the government leads a “war against organized crime,” and meanwhile has sent tens of thousands of soldiers into the most threatened provinces, the drug cartels gain respect in a brutal way. In addition, they skirmish among themselves in bloody battles. Besides that, as one learns, hundreds of thousands of “economic refugees” push illegally from Mexico and throughout Central and Latin America through Mexico to the USA and cause unacceptable conditions, especially in the border regions.
Mexico's government evidently has to deal not only with ordinary disturbances of public order, the usual level of crime in a functioning capitalist society, or sporadic attacks on representatives and facilities of state power. In the form of the drug cartels, it is confronted with a counter-power that undermines and saps the state's authority over internal conditions in the country. Also, the government not only has to oversee a certain sediment of the poor; it wrestles for control over a growing mass of dispossessed who push into or out of the country and have grown into a problem of state order. Mexico's government therefore does not have control of its country as a whole. By now an open crisis and state of war prevails. It is questionable what power the state leaders really command and to what extent their political will is the generally binding directive to all social goings on. The monopoly of violence as such, the taken for granted validity and general acceptance of state authority in the country are called into question, partly suspended in practice, partly openly or covertly opposed.
This precarious situation, which the Mexican state struggles to control, owes itself to the successful way in which Mexico's leadership has prescribed a show of power of the nation: it is the result of the ruling elite's program of promoting its own rule by an especially close connection to the USA and of making up for the lack of capitalistic power by giving American capital comprehensive license to use the country.
The Mexican success model: National progress through international capital inflows – in alliance with the U.S.
Mexico ranks among the group of “emerging markets,” the countries which in expert opinion had previously pursued a mistaken policy because they squandered foreign credit and foreign exchange earnings on “unprofitable national development projects” and “costly social programs,” but have now come to reason. This consists of aligning their national economic and financial policies with the requirements of the international capital agencies, operating budgetary policies in coordination with the IMF, cutting back social expenses and making their country's economic development generally dependent on the interests and business needs of foreign capital. Mexico is widely acknowledged to have led the way in an exemplary manner since the 1980s, and made decisive progress by its close economic ties to the American market with the NAFTA treaty concluded in 1994. [1] The centerpiece of the economic relations between the U.S. and Mexico includes not only the repeal of virtually all tariffs and trade restraints, but goes beyond a “classic” free trade agreement: with its agreements on financial services, intellectual property protection and rules of public procurement, it ensures that the free movement of American entrepreneurship is restricted neither in cross border trade nor in capital flows.
US capital has made ample use of this offer, so that a growing part of American business makes its living at a Mexican address: U.S. products have conquered the Mexican market en masse due to the superior productivity of U.S. capital; North American companies make thorough use of the ruthless management of human labor and natural conditions that are allowed across the border; the so-called maquiladora industries [2] function either as suppliers or directly under American direction as a tax- and tariff-free cheap wage division of American textile and electronics production. US capital is furthermore invested in every possible enterprise and infrastructure facility in Mexico, which American financial power is free to access thanks to the privatization policy of the last twenty years. Mexico is all in all successfully adapted as a production site and market for American goods, as well as an investment sphere for dollar capital and credit, and to that extent represents nothing more than an extended sphere of American capital growth. [3] And in its wake, European capital is also increasingly active in the country in order to supply especially the North American market from this cheap location.
Mexico has been carried in this way to the status of a leading “emerging market.” Under the guidance of international financial supervision, and with the help of a safe and supervised U.S. Treasury debt policy, the country has become a favorite object of speculative foreign money capital. It stands or falls in this respect with the trend of confidence that the foreign monetary investors give or take away from the country, and with the special interest Washington shows to the site as a solid part of the dollar's credit sphere. [4]
The hoped-for development of a national business base that brings Mexico enough dollars for the certification of its state credit, and which supplies the vast majority of the workforce with a productive capitalist exploitation as cheap wage labor, has not come about. Even today, oil revenues are the largest foreign exchange earner, apart from the remittances of millions of Mexicans abroad and migrant workers in the U.S. The upswing from the “maquiladora” industries has remained limited, the expected coupling of the rest of the economy to the subcontracting of the United States has failed to appear. Apart from Mexico's increasingly competitive low-wage location, when it comes to low wages and freedoms for capital in terms of labor and environmental standards, other states are still on the scene, most notably China. Therefore Mexico, with its capitalist revenues as with its limits, is more than ever an appendage of the U.S. economy, with its own limited means of competition. With the oil business its main source of wealth, it is subsumed as a mere supplier of raw materials to growth in the capitalist centers, rather than this business serving as a lubricant for a national capital accumulation. And the dollars of the working emigrants as well as the business which the dollar- and euro-capitalists pursue on the Mexican location are not enough for developing the country into an adequate capital location. [5] On the contrary.
The “dark side” of progress: ruined livelihoods, alternative business and competing private force – a growing national emergency
This Mexican progress program, which with the NAFTA annexation to the U.S. economy, more free trade agreements with the EU, a liberal concession practice, extensive “deregulation” and budgetary restrictions as an “economic test case” and “success model for modern structural adjustment policies” in Latin America – with built-in guarantees for growth and stability, as it were – has indeed effected access to international capital and to that extent growth in Mexico; but it also produces at the same time ruinous effects for most of the Mexican economy, because it represents – this was the main problem of the country – no world marketable capital. Whole sectors of indigenous production have declined in the wake of the market opening – especially in agriculture. The opening of the Mexican market for agricultural products arranged within the framework of NAFTA, elimination of guaranteed prices for agricultural products as well as the repeal of the so-called inalienable “ejidos” – federal state land holdings allocated free of charge to local farmers – has exposed domestic agriculture to competition primarily with the agricultural capital of the U.S. and deprived the peasant population of land. This has destroyed incomes and means of subsistence on a large scale without opening up the prospect of an if-ever-so-limited wage laborers existence to the now free campesinos. The limited capitalist growth already produces more than enough surplus population in the country. The merciless conversion of national cultivated land into renewable energy resources in accordance with the accounts of the world agricultural multinationals has also led to a slump in national food production and, in the wake of it, to rises in prices and danger to the supply of large parts of the population.
The flip side of Mexico's transformation into a limited sphere of international capital growth is therefore, alongside the destruction without replacement of much of the national economy, the sudden growth of overpopulation, those who are not designated for any useful services, for whom there are therefore no opportunities for material subsistence. A growing part of the people drop out of their previously already precarious existence into absolute poverty.
The hoped-for national progress in terms of capital growth, and with it profitable employment, has not materialized. Instead, alternative businesses and modes of existence outside of the state-desired but limited spheres of profitable wealth production have taken an upswing, which is again owed to the U.S.: its need for cheap labor and its flourishing drug market.
The impoverished population not only fills the slums, but looks en masse in the motherland of capitalism for a be-it-ever-so miserable basic existence that is not offered domestically. Along with have-nots from Central America who have also fallen victim to the free market way of calculating and who use Mexico as a transit country, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans every year choose the risky journey north – and also find mass admission there as migrant and day laborers. As the majority of illegal immigrants in the United States, they form the pool of a randomly available cheap labor force with no rights; they relieve their native country and even decisively improve its foreign exchange balance with their remittances. On the one hand, this is a windfall for a state that can count on no productive service from its people in their own country, so it mostly registers them as an unproductive burden and treats them with appropriate ruthlessness. Precisely for this reason, these masses with their uncontrolled flows are considered a surveillance problem by a state power, but at the same time a constant law and order problem, especially as a good part of the impoverished population have seized opportunities for life and survival under these conditions within the country that are beyond state control.
Following the close political economic accessibility of Mexico to the U.S., drug cultivation in Mexico has suddenly increased and the country developed into a main hub of drug trafficking. The United States is not only the largest sales market, it is also the business headquarters of this illegal – therefore, according to the capitalist way of accounting, especially lucrative – business. Mexico's drug cartels operate virtually as branch offices of the American drug business in an especially favorable immediate proximity to the U.S. They use the location advantage which results from the integrated market and the geographic position. And they are at the same time beneficiaries of the widespread impoverishment of the population: for drug cultivation and trafficking, they help themselves from the huge reservoir of impoverished peasants and other Mexicans with no means of existence who in view of their situation do not shy away from the risk of illicit cultivation and other services for one of the cartels. [6]
The activities of the drug cartels on Mexican territory have been driven in particular by Washington's “war on drugs” in the southern states of the continent. The U.S. government directs its struggle against the state-discredited business not only, and not even primarily, as the constitutional prosecution of domestic “business people” and consumers; rather Washington treats this battle as an imperialistic question of order and insists with all the means available to a world power that the “drug transit and cultivation countries” adopt its way of seeing the drug problem: they should stop drug cultivation in their countries, destroy the relevant areas under cultivation, pursue the drug bosses and extradite them to the USA, even if drug cultivation and trafficking appears for these nations by no means as pure organized crime. Because of these efforts, forced by the USA, to eliminate the “drug swamp” in Latin America, the drug cartels constantly shifted their commercial centers over the last years and decades – from Bolivia and Peru to Colombia and Central America; now Mexico has become the central hub.
In Mexico, the drug Mafia has become a threatening power which has established, with their economic network and their organized private force, a kind of counter-rule within the state. With the dollars earned in drug trafficking, the drug cartels have developed more illegal spheres of business, run an extensive arms smuggling operation, extorted protection money with threats and terror and have organized a real “kidnapping industry.” They have long latched into official business life. [7] As a power present in all areas of the society, they carry out an ambiguous substitute for the non-existing achievements of the domestic business world and the public authority: they create income where legal sources do not exist, cleanse illegal money in public tills, operate as social sponsors as well as commanders of their own “police forces” which back up the willing cooperation of public officials such as the police, judiciary and politicians with bribery, threats and “punitive actions.” With the combination of money power and private force, the drug Mafia does not merely represent a disturbance for a force monopoly functioning in principle, but an alternative ruling power over broad swathes of the society in competition with the state force. At the same time, they carry their bitter war of rivalry in money and power ruthlessly and ostentatiously into public space. With their organized private rule, the cartels undermine the state's monopoly on violence, cause the relative powerlessness of the state, the disintegration of internal order and the institutions of order, and exploit the destroyed reproduction of the masses and drive the collapse of the state power forward at the same time.
In addition, organized political resistance stirs in view of the disastrous social consequences of the NAFTA annexation. Various guerrilla groups fight against “neoliberal,” “America-enslaved” politics as well as against the everyday torments, particularly of the rural and Indian population, and in some regions contest the authority of the state. [8]
The Mexican President steps up to the challenge: create order by force!
Since his inauguration at the end of 2006, President Calderón leaves no doubt about the fact that he derives the task of cleaning up the interior from the decomposition of state authority. There is no question for his government of a political-economic reorientation, for instance an alternative program for a betterment of the people and nation like left government administrations have tried in recent years in Latin America as a practical consequence of the increasing impoverishment of their people and the disruption of their internal relations. For him, the ups and downs of Mexico's success stands or falls by the fact that Mexico proves itself as a special zone of dollar capitalism and as an investment location of international capital that is geared to their needs. Therefore the President gathers one meaning from the domestic situation: he understands the consequences of the Mexican path to progress in reverse, as causes for the lack of progress on this path and as its endangerment: disruptive forces are challenging the state-guaranteed order, undermining internal security and the command of the state over national conditions and are in this respect a threat to its achieved status as an “emerging market,” which the state must meet appropriately rigorously. [9] It is therefore about, in Calderon's program, “restoring Mexico's sovereignty on its territory and not losing it in important parts of Mexico to organized crime ... It is a war for which there is no alternative. It will probably take longer than my tenure.” (Calderon, in an interview quoted in Handelsblatt, March 24, 2007).
As the top national politician, Calderon wants to deploy state violence to take on inner threats to state sovereignty whose real causes lie in Mexico's external relations. He promises to recapture with his own power sovereignty over a country whose sources of wealth and state power, as well as their limitations, are a product of the country's functionalization to the wealth and power of the USA, which the President does not want to touch – rather he definitely sets on it.
The foreign guidelines for the Mexican struggle for internal security: Washington's expansive demands for order
The struggle for national sovereignty internally is therefore at the same time also aimed, by recapturing its power, at Mexico's recognition by the outside world, which Mexico's leaders with all their national development efforts want to functionalize themselves for. In steadfastly going forward with the decision to take on the increasing disorder and organized private force in the country, the Mexican President responds to the USA's growing criticism of Mexico. The Bush administration from the beginning and with increasing emphasis, especially after 9/11, required Mexico to violently clean up these conditions and cared just as little as its predecessors about the difficulties and calculations on the Mexican side. For American politicians, the consequences of the Mexican connection to the U.S. appears as a fundamental violation of the American right to orderly state relations which Washington can simply expect from other countries – especially from a neighbor and partner state regarded as having a lot of special rights and special freedoms. With the ignorance of superior power, Washington has therefore insisted that the Mexican government should kindly take the disturbing consequences of its connection to the U.S. under control so they no longer disturb the USA.
This first concerns the growing power of the Mexican drug cartels. This is for the imperialistic marshals in Washington confirmation that the drug swamp in Latin America is far from being dried out, and that therefore the “war on drugs” should press ahead unconditionally, continent-wide and certainly in their neighboring state of Mexico; because reinforced danger threatens from there, because the drug cartels “spread” from Mexico increasingly into the United States – this is the American view of a discredited business that has its origin and destination point in the USA:
“Over the past decade, drug trafficking and other criminal organizations have grown in size and strength, aggressively seeking to undermine and intimidate government institutions in Mexico and Central America, compromising municipal and state law enforcement entities, and substantially weakening these governments’ ability to maintain public security and expand the rule of law … The effects of this growing problem are also readily apparent in the United States in the form of gang violence, crime, and higher rates of trafficking in persons and illegal drugs – all of which threaten our own national security and impose mounting economic costs.” (Thomas A. Shannon, former Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs) [10]
The second concerns the Mexican and Central American immigrants pressing over the border. They are, on the one hand, in their illegal status a particularly suitable economic pawn for American agriculture as a cheap labor force. At the same time, however, there are still too many of them; they come even if they may not be needed, circumvent state control, find their way over the border despite surveillance – in short: they do not acquiesce to the role of a demand-based, state supervised cheap wage reserve, but with their wretched calculations make their presence known as a state order problem. In addition, the border regime also leaves much to be desired on the other side. So Washington must state that Mexico functions increasingly as a trading center for laundering money acquired in the millions of dollars in U.S. drug trafficking and arms smuggling from the U.S.
All this disturbs Washington and all the more since it has identified the crucial new challenge to American world power in the global threat of terrorism. The anti-terror war sharpens the view they take of domestic order in the states of Latin America and Mexico in particular. US intelligence agencies have promptly discovered that guerrilla organizations and potential terrorists are collaborating with organized crime all over the place, using the smuggling routes and infrastructure of the drug cartels and vice versa performing useful services for them, so that “throughout the hemisphere, terrorist groups, insurgents and drug traffickers arrive through illegal trade, robbery and smuggling weapons” (Shannon, February 11, 2008). According to the US version, Mexico “now is definitely in the phase of narcoterrorism” (US Department of Justice, El Pais, May 23, 2008). In any case – with this connection the US government defines drug trafficking, illegal immigrants, money laundering, arms smuggling and political resistance as one and the same: as an undermining of American statehood and as an elementary threat to America's national security. Ironically, the southern neighbor, flagship partner in the case for free trade, important business sphere for American capital and credit, threatens to become a “threat to prosperity” and a “bastion of instability,” a gateway for “anti-American activities,” and remains delinquent in times of the global war against terrorism in its services as a stable pro-American bastion and bulwark against left machinations in Latin America.
In Washington's eyes, there is only one reason for these disturbing conditions escalating in Mexico: Mexican politics lets the due crackdown fail. And this is again a disclosure – so the self-evident conclusion for the world power – that there is a lack of American control over Mexico. Whatever calculations the local administrators carry out with regard to the situation in the country, they are challenged to prove themselves as guarantors of stable statehood, to recapture the “lawless and unruled areas” on their territory, and to stop the stream of money, goods and people, as well as all the other intrigues which Washington sees as a threat to its national security. Only in this way can the national administrators of this special zone of dollar capitalism count on the recognition of the USA. The US government on its part is challenged to intensify its concern about the fact that Mexican politics takes over and completes this order with the requisite ruthlessness.
The struggle against “organized crime” and its swamp – with the backing of the USA
The Mexican President accommodates this growing American criticism with his order program, he after all wants to secure his country in the role of America's preferred partner in Latin America. With his state counter-attack in the interior, he struggles at the same time with the US demands. His decision to finally clean up the country and to conquer a new political power with an inward “war against organized crime” is owed to the desire to face the USA's reservations offensively. With his program for a national struggle, he wants to prove his determination and ability to satisfy America's need for order as a sovereign partner. Its own suffering from wounded sovereignty and the need to put up with the Americans' bill of discontent coincide here and spur the assertiveness of the Mexican government. Conversely, it insist nevertheless on its demand that Washington support these efforts to restore order and accommodate Mexican claims. Mexico's chief of state wants to mobilize the power of the USA for his battle. With American help, he wants to assert the Mexican state's damaged monopoly on violence. Thus he wants to meet the problem that national conditions break down as a source of stable state power and not give away the necessary means for the struggle to consolidate state power.
In regards to the containment of migration, Calderon seamlessly follows the program that has already long been underway from American pressure and was sped up after September 2001 in cooperation with Washington. His predecessors had already not shut themselves off to the American call to treat the migrants as a threat to the national security of the northern neighbor rather than considering them primarily as a foreign currency earner for Mexico or as a potential disruptive force in the interior which one is happy to get rid of. With the financial and material support of Washington, Mexico is by now sealed by a constantly tightened control regime on its northern and southern borders and enlarged into a jointly controlled, extended security zone of the United States.
This border regime aims not only at the unwanted border crossings of starvelings, but also at defending from all the dangers from the south which Washington has identified and those it wants to put a stop to. [11] Topping the political list of orders for the Mexican president, as for the USA, is the “fight against organized crime” of drug trafficking. Because of its increase, and because of the growing American pressure, it is certain for Calderón that Mexico's old political regime's calculating ways of dealing with this national problem sphere, more or less openly tolerated and unofficial arrangements between politicians and drug organizations, are no longer supportable. Until now the state agencies had been permeated by Mafia-dependent characters who pursued the contradictory concerns of not allowing the power of the drug cartels to turn into an open threat to their sovereignty, but on the other hand not stirring them up by a too rigorous state approach. At the same time they were certainly officially willing to support American pressure for tougher action, but coincidentally to circumvent US demands or to ostentatiously reject American intervention into their sovereignty.
Now this maneuvering is to stop. Still in the first month of office, Calderón sends thirty thousand soldiers marching into numerous states, digs up drug labs, sets marijuana and poppy fields on fire. To dry out the “swamp of corruption” and make the fight against organized crime effective, extensive purges of whole security departments throughout the state follow; high political representatives of the federal and tax police as well as state police chiefs are suspended from their posts, studies of complications are started in drug murders which transfer the tasks of the police to the military security service; the federal police force recruited from the military is properly increased, their salaries raised. To secure the financing of the order program, the President submits a billion dollar program to combat organized crime. And with the demonstrative extradition of fifteen drug lords to the United States, accompanied by a request for American money and means of violence, he demonstrates his willingness to cooperate with Washington's purposes and to withhold any previous reservations about national sovereignty. However, in return he calls first for material support in the fight against “narco-terrorism” and secondly for political accommodation from the United States in the settlement of contentious issues of immigration.
The assistance of the United States – promoting and demanding a thrashing Mexican state force
Washington is interested only in the former and concludes an agreement with the Mexican government, the “Merida Initiative”:
“In Mexico, President Calderon has acted decisively, using the most effective tools at his disposal. He is reorganizing the federal police, putting new and additional resources in the hands of his security services, deploying military units to support police operations, rooting out corrupt officials, attacking impunity, arresting major crime figures, and extraditing a record number of drug kingpins and other criminals to the United States. The determination and commitment shown by the Calderon Administration is historic; and the early results impressive … However, President Calderon has recognized that leadership and political will are not enough; he needs greater institutional and material resources to ensure both nearterm success and long-term institutional change. In an unprecedented step, he has asked the United States to launch a new partnership with Mexico and to help him strengthen Mexican law enforcement, public safety, and border security to defeat the drug and criminal organizations. This is not a 'traditional' foreign assistance request. It is, as our joint declaration called it, a new paradigm for security cooperation.” (Shannon, Testimony Before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, November 14, 2007; http://merln.ndu.edu/archivepdf/ARA/State/95195.pdf)
The U.S. representative leaves no doubt that the negotiated agreement should guarantee its security needs in Mexico. What is agreed upon within the joint “Mérida Initiative” as a “new paradigm” for security and stability assistance is comprised primarily of military equipment in the form of aircraft, helicopters and training for Mexican police and military forces, as well as communication and monitoring technology in order to “obtain timely information that is necessary to combat criminal and terrorist activities and to ward off those who want to exploit the national weaknesses of the USA and Mexico.” It is in fact a real development assistance from state to state: exclusively for the purpose of enabling and training the Mexican government to strike against the drug cartels and for border surveillance and the defense of any threat to American security. In this sense, the Mexican foreign minister confirms that “the so-called Merida initiative intends not only joint operations against drug trafficking, but also the objective of protecting the United States from potential terrorist attacks, and therefore the resources made available by the U.S. to Mexico also provides for the purchase of equipment to control emigration movements on both sides of the border.” (La Jornada, November 2007) With the appropriate training as well as material and logistical support from the United States, the Mexican military apparatus should be competent and at the same time determined to fulfill the comprehensive U.S. order mission – a mixture of military support and practical distrust on the part of the superpower in the determination and ability of the Mexican addressee. In this way, with its superior means of force and policing, it takes advantage of the opportunity to latch in the relevant Mexican efforts – a welcome strategic gain. [12] For the partner state, this help in the fight for a decent monopoly on violence and means at the same time more subordination under U.S. demands. [13]
The progress of the Mexican “success model” in the direction of “failing state”: escalating violence – and growing discontent with the disintegration of the Mexican state
The results of this struggle against “organized crime” and its “swamp” have done little to bring “stability.” Instead, the American-supported effort to do away with the disturbing activities and clean up the situation in the country turns into a violent struggle to generally regain state control over the country. As far as the state leaders take seriously a functional force monopoly with this struggle, they attack the state's own bases and touch upon the continued existence of the nation. The struggle for order in the country contributes to the corrosion in internal affairs which it wants to consolidate in a way useful to rule.
Through the ever more rigorous border regime, the attempts of the impoverished masses to escape the intolerable conditions at home are prevented, with the result that a growing number of slums in Mexico and other Latin American countries become populated and also an important source of foreign currency dries up for the state: the remittances of those who have made it to America and any job. The course of the crisis, which decreases America's demand for foreign cheap workers, now does the rest, allowing the overpopulation in Mexico to suddenly swell. The trade off demanded by Mexico and dangled by the United States – a guest worker agreement as well as the legalization of some 5 million Mexicans living illegally in the U.S. – by which these problem cases for Mexico should become a mutually regulated and thus predictable outpost, Washington still rejects however with reference to Mexico's unsatisfactory “concessions.” And with their destruction of drug crops, the government also destroys the sole miserable basis for existence of a good part of the rural population.
With its offensive against the drug cartels, the state tangles with an opponent which organizes and controls whole departments of economic and social life and has also long been included in “legitimate” business and banking; is firmly rooted in the people, in big parts of the bourgeoisie and above all in the state apparatus; but its crucial basis, the US drug market and its agents, remain removed from the access of the Mexican authorities. In so far as the state plans to proceed against the “drug economy,” it threatens at the same time to incalculably harm the national economy itself, with no new productive order in view as a substitute. The state action is thus defined by the irresolvable contradiction of curbing drug cultivation and trafficking, but wanting to avoid large-scale disruption and destruction of the business motor in the country. Therefore, the economic bases of the competing private powers survive in the country in spite of spectacular actions like the destruction of poppy areas under cultivation and production factories of the stuff. And with it the financial currents also continue to flow. Those cash and book money-components – freshly laundered in the USA and elsewhere – are not neatly distinguishable as clean from those “tidier” bank transactions in “clean” businesses anyway – especially under conditions where a greater part of business takes place as a “black market” and “informal sector,” thus on sufferance completely outside state control and requirements, and also the “formal sector” economizes with state special terms, political protection and systematic exemption from all sorts of consequences – not only with regard to working conditions and the environment, but also with regard to taxes, profits and money transactions.
The state anti-drug struggle is directed then also mainly as an extensive drug manhunt, thus to stop drug deliveries and to arrest the relevant figures up to the drug barons, as well as to drive back the political influence of the gangs. This pursuit of organized crime, involving a permanent deployment of the judiciary and the police, necessarily sets in motion a bloody showdown. The drug organizations respond to the state challenge with a public declaration of war, prepare and remove in increasing numbers “traitors” from the police, judiciary and other state circles, also deterring anyone who places themselves on the wrong side in the fight. Moreover, they take the extradition of their bosses as the opportunity to battle for successions and takeovers, by which the power of the drug Mafia reorganizes itself and which affects the whole country. And as far as the Mexican government on its side steps up the fight, the state apparatus itself also opens as a hidden battleground, regulatory policy is coerced into tidying up their own institutions, the loyalty of state agents on both sides is put to a hard test and the functioning of state institutions is challenged.
Not only do poverty and absolute misery increase in the course of the fight, but also everyday violence and terror on all sides. [14] Mexico is not just suffering from too little political will for order, only having to decide to pull itself together and clamp down; each such venture rather reveals how damaged and under attack this sovereignty is in reality. The attempt to consolidate state power by force once again refers to the basic contradiction that this state has made itself dependent in its national cause on foreign wealth and foreign power, but through this dependence it is not strengthened and not materially advanced, but increasingly weakened.
The point of view solidifies among the national elite of Mexico, in the wake of the “escalation of the situation,” that the state must proceed with even more determination and with more force of its own for order, in order to get the increasing violence under control. In August 2008, government and judiciary, entrepreneurs' groups, organizations of “civil society” and representative of the mass media advise on a “national security summit” about the necessity of a rescue of the nation and agree on a “pact against crime.” [15] Hundreds of thousands unite against the “excessive violence” with the battle cry “Illuminate Mexico!” and the call on the politicians “to act,” at last, in the streets. Even the party of López Obrador, the bitter opponent of Calderón in the 2007 presidential election, helps carry the government program with a vast majority. [16] The state's declaration of war on the pervasive worsening acts of violence in the country thus promotes the widespread wish for a functioning state monopoly on violence and for what the President at the beginning of his term of office has not managed to bring about with the call for a national effort in the “hour of national need” behind the government: unity between the government and the opposition about the necessity to mobilize more state power. The lack of success in the common project to do away with the “violence” ensures, on the other hand, that the public criticism that accuses the government of failure and breaking its promise to finally restore order does not die out.
However, the criticism is weightier from the side of the USA, which sees itself in no way satisfied by the new cooperation. The American government sees the inability of the Mexican state to handle the negative consequences of its existence as an appendage of the USA strictly as those responsible people in Mexico still not correctly doing the task of order which Washington holds them responsible for. If the fight against “narcoterrorism” newly opened by the Calderón government turns solely into a real test for the Mexican state and transforms social relations into a violent chaos, then in the American view the Mexican political order has failed again. America's ambassador to Mexico makes it clear that with the escalation of violence Calderon is in principle on the only correct path, but he has much further to go and must continue to take the matter as seriously as America demands:
“Mexico finds itself in a struggle against the drug cartels, one which it can not afford to lose ... Calderón has shown that Mexico did not flinch, and the control of its streets are not left to the criminals.” (El País, May 23, 2008) “He has to – and will – maintain pressure on the cartels, but we are not naive: there will be more violence, more blood, yes – the situation will get worse before it gets better. That is the nature of the struggle.” (Seattle Times, January 8, 2009)
Now critical voices again increase, casting into doubt the will and ability of the Mexican government to properly “crack down.”
“The state must take aim not only at armed arm of the cartels and their leaders, but also destroy the financial networks and stop the corruption in politics, the judiciary and police. But even here the government is doing too little.” (A government consultant, Handelsblatt, February 26, 2009)
As if Mexico's government could put aside the “drug money” that “in some provinces is behind more than half the firms” and the annual yield of an “estimated 100 billion dollars” and prevent the dollar flows to and from the United States just like that; as if they must align their own calculations, only much more ruthlessly, to the American Order; kindly enforce a state-controlled, guaranteed free of drug mafia, well-sorted and business-friendly American security zone, and order, stability and a functioning state power would be ensured. Meanwhile, the official agencies of the United States have “repeatedly spoken loud and clear of Mexico as a 'failed state,' large parts of the country are at the mercy of lawlessness – and where the state itself no longer has much to say.” (HB, March 2, 2009 ) The U.S. Defense Department has placed the Mexican government in a rank with Pakistan: “On the way to a failed state!” This is obviously not an admission of where it has brought the Mexican regime with its special relation with the U.S., but a recrimination of Mexico and a description of the negative status which the US world power might soon have to give this state if it does not quickly turn things around for the better: the government does not have its country under control, fails in principle before the American requirements for order, and therefore no longer deserves the world power's respect. Praised as exemplary – even if a bit unequal – the NAFTA partnership connection undergoes its official redefinition into a surveillance relation over a problem state which Washington must decisively influence without false consideration with its instruments of power.
This is solely a provocation for the Mexican President who wants to attain America's recognition and support with his order program. So Calderón emphatically rejects Washington's criticism, which as a power conscious politician he easily takes as the downgrading of his rule: “The claim that Mexico is a 'failed state' is absolutely false. I have not lost a single part of the Mexican territory.” (Calderón, Washington Post, February 27, 2009)
Instead of any such undermining, he emphatically requests more support from the United States for the common cause:
“There is no single problem in Mexico, it is a common problem that the United States and Mexico have to tackle together ... We expect a clearer and more decisive response appropriate to the size of the problem.” (Interview, La Jornada, March 4, 2009) [17]
So the offended President of Mexico wrestles with the imperialist superpower for attention and commits himself to calling for the program of making progress with the help of the USA. A nice challenge for the new “savior” of the American nation, Barack Obama, with whom not least Mexico's hopes for a better world are also tied up:
“Felipe Calderón invited President Obama to raise bilateral relations to the level of a strategic alliance in order to solve common problems such as ensuring security and the fight against organized crime and the drug mafia.” Because to Calderón: “The more secure Mexico is, the more secure the U.S. will be.”
Here cross the urgent wish of the Latin American preferred partner degenerating into a failing state for more respect and support from the USA and the criticism of the imperialist leading power, which has long looked at Mexico with its government as an American security problem of the first order and is determined to treat is as such. If the new US President visits Calderón as the first head of state in Latin America and confirms the US-Mexican partnership in the spirit of the “Mérida initiative,” then he takes nothing back in Washington's discontent about the scathing balance sheet for success in the war on drugs. And if the new U.S. Secretary of State, to the astonishment of the public, “concedes” that the U.S. is jointly responsible for the fact that the drug cartels cause trouble, and promises to do more about it in her own country, then she does not dismiss Mexico from its responsibility – to the contrary: she stresses the importance of this struggle and with it Mexico's efforts in the global political agenda of the USA. Accordingly, Washington steps up not only its own military presence along the border with Mexico, but also American personnel and military assistance, which should help the Mexican efforts to properly achieve security and stability. [18]
So progresses the “success model Mexico.”
Footnotes
[1] The development of large Mexican oil fields beginning in the 1970s, which thereby suddenly increased revenue and raised the international creditworthiness of the state, were the initial starting point for the state's political efforts to set in motion a global market national economy with state credit and an economic policy in the service of “import substitution.” The celebrated “Mexican miracle” of the 70s ended in a debt crisis in the early 80s. Mexico, like other Latin American countries as well, has subsequently bid farewell to this national development program under pressure from the relevant credit granters under direction of the IMF and the World Bank. With the turn away from “domestic development supported by foreign-trade restrictions” to an economic policy of “growth outward” – according to the expert version – the Mexican government has moved resolutely to free trade and opening to foreign capital as the best means for national advancement and has in addition set on special relations with the USA. With the help of U.S. capital and technology, new areas of production should be instituted, Mexico's economic base widened, the export base diversified; with the conclusion of the Nafta agreement – at least in the vision of the former Mexican President Gortari – the “threshold to the First World” should finally be crossed.
[2] This term characterizes plants in Mexico that import raw materials and intermediate products, process them and export them again, thus standing completely in the service of foreign capital.
[3] This applies not least to the oil business. Even before the annexation of Mexico to the NAFTA economic zone, the U.S. had protected itself as a major supplier of oil and natural gas through pipeline construction and supply contracts with the state oil company of Mexico; in the course of privatization, oil refining then became a direct sphere of American business. Only oil production still stands under the auspices of the state's PEMEX. Their foreign exchange earnings are always inadequate because in view of the notorious state budgetary emergencies it always plans to make the necessary substitute investments or develop new sources. So the various governments constantly move in the contradiction of, on the one hand, trying to mobilize private capital for the necessary investments and therefore also giving serious consideration to the full privatization of PEMEX, but on the other hand in no case wanting to give up national sovereignty and control over oil production.
[4] That the initial balance sheet of the NAFTA accession turned to be out worse than expected brought the withdrawal of that confidence and the crash of the peso to Mexico in 1994. Thanks to the intervention of the US Federal Reserve and an IMF credit of 50 billion dollars as well as an economic-political “shock treatment” saved Mexico's solvency, the confidence of finance capital in Mexico's “fundamentals” was aroused again and so speculation on the investment site was again set on course. Since then, Mexico's oil revenues are used primarily to service the accumulated billions in debt and to maintain Mexico's creditworthiness.
[5] “Going global applies however only to a small minority of Mexican companies… According to data from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 2003 dispensed approximately 82.5 billion US dollars of the export earnings of the 7000 companies registered in Mexico, the majority of which are subsidiaries of transnational corporations whose export trade consists in more than two thirds from transnational intra-industrial supplies.” (Focus Latin America, Mexico and NAFTA, 3/04) “The Maquila industry remains an enclave, which is only very slightly linked with other Mexican industries. The low level of interdependence has the consequence that original technologies are not (further) developed by Mexican companies. Only 1% of the supplied production parts are of Mexican origin… Since 2000 approx. 60% of the Maquila enterprises went to China. China displaced Mexico as the second largest trading partner of the USA. Both on the national and on the American market, Chinese goods displace Mexican.” (Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Mexico - Interim Balance after the Change of Power, 2003)
[6] One-third of Mexico's agricultural land is now used for poppy cultivation.
[7] As early as the mid 90s approximately 30 billion U.S. dollars have annually flowed from the drug trade into the Mexican economy: “More and more U.S. politicians and police officials from drug enforcement agencies openly state their suspicion that the financial support of the IMF did not lead Mexico's economy out of the peso crisis, but revenue from the drug business ... For most Mexican banks billions of dollars from the drug business has become a major source of credit financing. About 20 percent of all loans granted are financed mainly in this way, according to experts.” (wirtschaftsblatt.at, September 17, 1997).
[8] The most famous organization is the EZLN: an Indian guerrilla movement which began, highly symbolically on the effective date of the NAFTA Treaty, the struggle to improve the wretched living conditions with the modest means available to them and held on for a few years. Even if in 2000 they swore off the military struggle – no less highly symbolically – with a peace march in the official capital, today they still control a big area in the south of Mexico and administer it according to their own “indigenous” law.
[9] “Now Calderón's Minister of Finance Augustin Carsten fears effects on the attractiveness of the investment location. The 2006 Report of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean on foreign investment shares this concern: 'Lack of security is an increasingly important factor and limits new foreign investments,' said CEPAL Chef José Luis Machinea at the launch of the report. This is not just a police issue, but affects the entire functioning of the state.” (Friedrich Ebert Foundation: Mexico's Struggle Against Organized Crime, 2007, p. 1-2). So it is again important to provide “security.” Calderón: “To the extent to which Mexico is progressing steadily with the establishment of safe conditions and values law higher than the interests of crime, I am sure that this factor more than any other will allow opportunities for new investment to explode in Mexico.” (January 26, 2007, “Calderón offers a peaceful Mexico,” www. Presidencia.gob.mx).
[10] U.S. Secretary of State Shannon on November 16, 2007 before Congress as justification for the approval of American funding for the American-Mexican “Merida Initiative.”
[11] On the southern border of Mexico the border posts have been technologically upgraded, border police have increased considerably and been reinforced by U.S. GIs, as well as high security visas for citizens from Ecuador, Honduras and Brazil introduced. All over southern Mexico, the police and military presence has significantly expanded, all over the country police and military outposts have been reinforced; furthermore a “program for voluntary repatriation” has been completed in order to deport the striving masses in the U.S. to their home towns before reaching the border again, the biometric data collection of individuals introduced and the presence of American military in Mexican airports agreed to. The success is to be seen not least in the complaints of the southern neighbors: “Mexico has its transformed its entire territory into a border for us. The border of the USA begins in Chiapas, and ends at the Rio Bravo, which means that the actual border no longer represents the United States of America, but the United States of Mexico.” (A Nicaraguan Minister, El Heraldo, March 7, 2005). Also Calderón continues the policy of his predecessors in the fight against guerrillas. The relevant organizations are under constant military observation and repeatedly contend with the Mexican power apparatus, even if like the EZLN “Zapatistas” they are no longer active as combatants, but rather as socially-oriented alternative local authorities.
[12] “The Merida Initiative is the result of a crisis situation. This crisis situation gives us the strategic opportunity to reshape our security cooperation and to expand the dialogue with our partners on the difficult task of enforcing security and justice. The Merida Initiative provides us a platform to enhance this partnership and to cooperate with our immediate neighbors in the hemisphere more effectively in combating a threat that affects us all.” (DT Johnson, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, in a Congressional hearing, March 18, 2009)
[13] Therefore, Calderón also takes care to satisfy the anti-American tinged national pride of his own public. The accusation that with this program he yields to American paternalism he meets with regular public objections that he forbids any interference from the United States. In particular, he advertises that the security pact with the USA contrasts to others of the same kind such as “Plan Columbia” that are nationally unworthy of Mexico, with no presence of American troops on Mexican soil.
[14] Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a new “super-cartel” has formed which has more economic resources and power. The conflicts in Mexico simultaneously affect other Central American states, especially Guatemala, which until now served the drug cartels as a transit country and now as a new evasion area. Its President complains: “They have the entire province of Huehuetenango near the border with Mexico under their control, but they are also in the regions of Alta Verapaz, in Quiché, in the Petén, and even on the Caribbean coast. They want to seize all of Guatemala ... If we do nothing, organized crime from Mexico has in two years taken the capital of Guatemala City.” The complaint does not go unheard. The “Merida Initiative” also provides Central America and the Caribbean a few million dollars and military aid.
[15] The collectively propagated objectives are: reform of the criminal justice system with harsher punishment, especially for kidnappers and hostage takers, installation of new high-security prisons, the appointment of specialized judges, a more effective fight against money laundering, all “monitored” by civil society, which checks the measures for their effectiveness. In addition, the call for the reintroduction of the death penalty increases in politics and in public.
[16] The Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the opposition, is meanwhile divided: The majority of representatives of the PRD work on legislative initiatives which should make the fight against “organized crime” more effective, and also signal their agreement to the main point of contention between the government and the opposition, the privatization of the state oil company PEMEX, but not without setting itself on the stage as a “social corrective.” Obrador, however, rails against the “false regime” and the “illegitimate president,” but also offers to support the internal security policy of the government out of national responsibility – under the condition that Calderon withdraws plans to privatize the state oil company PEMEX.
[17] To the reproach from Washington that the Mexican government would not destroy the financial network of criminal drug gangs, Calderon replied with the retort that the U.S. government on its part does not turn against, or at least does not do so effectively, the system of money laundering ultimately constructed in the USA – as Mexico's bank supervision is to distinguish illegal transfers from legal bank account movements. And anyway: “I fight the corruption in the Mexican authorities and risk everything to clean up here. But I believe a good cleansing is needed on the other side of the border also.” (Calderón, Focus, February 27, 2009)
[18] “In the Mexican capital a command center is created where the FBI and the U.S. anti-drug unit DEA are to be represented.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 16, 2009)